Re: [Texmacs-dev] Disastrous boot time for new versions

[david]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 12:14:29PM +0100, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> 
> > I think we should not forget that GUILE is a language for _extension_.
> > Not a language for application development. For example, it is fully
> > interpreted. In that respect, I think that TeXmacs is actually
> > _abusing_ GUILE.
> 
> This is a surprising statement, because you are the principal person
> who urged me to rely more on Guile for the top-level interface.

:-)

Well, I am very happy that more and more things get into the GUILE
layer, and I will continue to push into that direction. As I said,
abusing GUILE is no philosophical problem to me. What is philosophical
problem though is having policy code written C++ while it should be
written in a higher level language.

When I say texmacs is abusing GUILE, I just point out that GUILE is
notoriously slow. Anyway, I do not care much about long loading times
for texmacs. Complex application through the world have long loading
times.

Do anyone mind the long loading times of GIMP? I do not think so. As
Nix noted, this kind of application is generally left running for a
long time.

It may help the users perception if TeXmacs had some kind of
splash-screen with a display of the current action, like GIMP, so
users will rather think "wow! there is a lot in there" (as when
loading GIMP) instead of "well, so much time for so little" (as when
loading Gecko).


> > That is not a philosophical problem to me. But the more texmacs will
> > use GUILE as a application language (instead of a mere extension
> > language) the more it will make sense to use a more efficient
> > implementation of Scheme.
> 
> Do you know of more efficient implementations,
> which can also be used of extension languages?

I will look for that.

The problem is knowing what is the requirement for a scheme
implementation to be used as an extension language.

I suppose that is:

  -- easy to bind to C

  -- the full language in available in runtime

  -- no need for an external compiler (I suppose you do not want
     texmacs to depend on gcc :-)

  -- module system supporting namespaces


> Maybe you mean that we should compile part of the scheme programs.
> Are scheme compilers good at dealing with macros?

I see no reason why there should be any problem with macros, as long
as you stick to purely functional macros.